


Landscape

by sirenalley



Category: K (Anime)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-13
Updated: 2013-02-13
Packaged: 2017-11-29 04:03:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/682560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sirenalley/pseuds/sirenalley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When he sleeps, he sees nothing but dead wasteland. When he wakes, he’s only numbed down, asleep. That dead wasteland is him on the inside.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Landscape

When he sleeps, he sees nothing but dead wasteland. When he wakes, he’s only numbed down, asleep. That dead wasteland is him on the inside.

It happens beyond the grasp of his control, a slow and creeping domination of his awareness. When he doesn’t sleep because he can’t, he knows it’s there. A cool, close weight depressing the cushions of the couch as it settles behind him. It doesn’t touch him. 

That’s the worst part of all—a disconnect separates him, isolates him. Hasn’t it always been that way?

“King… Are you awake?”

He is now. He always is. His eyes are sealed, jaw gritted, blood rushing in a painful pulse to his head, body a long line of tension.

“You’re warm as always.”

It lingers, a corporeal stripe down his spine. It lingers longer than it should, longer than he can stand with fists clenched in futile defense. It’s not there, but it maintains a realness he can’t escape. 

“King—”

And then it’s gone, a light blinked out as quick as a lifeline. Mikoto breathes. His whole world narrows to a blistering point of emptiness. He watches the darkness swell into his peripheral like oil, thick smears crowding his vision. He breathes, but this time he can’t swallow the air past the knot of cartilage in his throat. He breathes, gags, chokes it back up in a sob wrenched clear from his chest.

A memory fades in with grayed edges. He remembers holding the phone against his ear, sealed with sweat.

“…I’ve got some bad news…”

The fire decays him from inside, and it flares at the following words; the phone melts in a blue magnetic crackle.

He should have been there. 

Wasn’t this inevitable? The black hiss edges into the back of his mind. Wasn’t this going to happen? A weak guy like that. Reckless, carefree, wide open and far away, without an anchor to the earth. 

He should have been there. 

Swaying against the support of a wall, Mikoto feels power lash like a whip against his core and it chills him unlike anything. It blows a hole into the brittle structure of his soul. He was never resilient—he’s in pieces, crumbling, falling apart under the pressure of a title.

The memory fades, and he’s alone again in the night.

Nightmares worsen. The wasteland opens around him, a despairing maw, unadulterated terror ribbing his gut. He feels it burst from deep under his skin—rising tide the color of clear flickering fire, red and tangerine. It’s blue at the center where it’s hottest, where it radiates. Mikoto’s eyes dip down and he watches his skin flay off in charred flakes of black. When he wakes, his eyes sting from the pale smoke.

There’s a body against his spine. 

Cool hands loop around, thumbs rubbing his hurt knuckles. Memory or not, Mikoto lets his eyes brim and burn over with bitter saltiness. The pain tempers and calms into a distant ache.

“I’m sorry, king. But it’ll be all right. You know that, don’t you?”

When it’s gone, splitting pain swells again and tears him apart, and he’s alone. It doesn’t come back.


End file.
